Testimony was, initially, a prose retelling of stories that Reznikoff had discovered while working on court records. In these stories, Reznikoff discovered something of the story of America between 1855 and 1915 both in its diversity and its violence. Tellingly, he chose to omit the judgements...

why would that be?

Acker's resources were as diverse as Charles Dickens, Cervantes, Hawthorne, the film Key Largo, and pirates in general.

We've already talked about this a little bit, especially vis a vis the cento. Mantis, and Mantis: An Interpretation, by Louis Zukofsky are arguably the most fun to argue about. But today my thought is how centos are very like dictionary definitions, with their sample usage sentences, and how definitions are like centos.

Why and how is this? There are several pretty obvious ways and reasons, many of which have to do with some of the purposes of writing or words in writing & meaning.